Free Stop the Clock by Alison Mercer Page B

warren of a place, a long, low, irregular structure that could never have been planned, but must have just been added to, bit by bit, over the years. There was scaffolding up in the reception area, and as she skirted round it someone called out, ‘Can I help you?’
    It was a tall old man with a shock of white hair, who was sitting at a plywood table next to a wall-mounted map of the premises.
    She hesitated, and he smiled at her encouragingly. His eyes were a milky pale blue; they looked as if they might be capable of otherworldly visions. He wore a neatly pressed check shirt with a lapel badge that announced he was a volunteer.
    ‘I’m looking for the stroke ward,’ she said.
    He pointed to the map and directed her, and she thanked him and set off briskly, although she was lesssure of the way with every step. As she walked on she felt herself undergoing the strange transition that afflicts anybody who enters a hospital, whereby personal history fades and becomes inconsequential, and the designated role – whether visitor, patient, worker or volunteer – takes over.
    Somehow she came to the right ward. She pressed the buzzer next to the entrance. And then she was in.
    She stumbled up to the nurses’ station and was told that Ellen was stable, that tests had been scheduled, that the consultant would be round soon.
    ‘Your sister’s here. Lucky she found her,’ one of the nurses told her, trying to be reassuring.
    There was nothing for it but to go on.
    She walked past a bedridden young man attended on by a sorrowful girl, who stroked his hand and murmured urgently; a heavy old man in striped pyjamas, who had turned his back on everyone; a couple of cubicles with drawn curtains; and two old ladies who were sitting, fully dressed, next to their beds. One was watching TV and the other was being told something in low, admonishing tones by a middle-aged woman. Her daughter, Lucy concluded; only a daughter would speak with such irritable intimacy.
    And then she came to Ellen, who was lying on her back, slightly propped up, with a drip connected to her hand, seemingly deeply asleep. Hannah was sitting beside her.
    Lucy leaned over and brushed Ellen’s cheek with her lips, and murmured, ‘Hello, Mummy.’ But Ellen’s only response was a snoring intake of breath, followed by awet-sounding exhalation. As Lucy straightened she saw that Ellen’s mouth was slack and twisted, and damp with spittle.
    Throughout Lucy’s childhood she had been aware that her mother was a beauty; it had been obvious not just from the pride Ellen took in grooming herself and dressing well, but in the special attention she attracted when dealing with tradesmen, Lucy’s friends’ fathers, the neighbouring husbands, and the other males who entered her orbit.
    But then, when Lucy was ten and Ellen was forty-two, Hannah had come along, and the girls’ father left them and Ellen gave up.
    Now, even in repose, she looked deformed; one side of her face sagged as if the skin had been frozen in the process of melting and sliding away from the bone. She had always been, like Lucy, a fleshy sort of woman – in her day, a curvaceous siren, and in old age, shapelessly substantial – but for the first time she struck Lucy as gaunt. The arms protruding from the sleeves of her nightie were sinewy and fleshless, and yet they were suggestive not of frailty, but of reserves of endurance.
    Hannah said, ‘This is my fault. I told her what happened. She told me I was a bloody fool. Said I was lucky you hadn’t gone for me.’
    Lucy looked up and saw that Hannah’s grey-blue eyes – so like Ellen’s – were small and bloodshot with crying.
    ‘Why did you do it?’ she asked. ‘The only reason I can think of is that you had a chance to take something that was mine. So you took it.’
    Hannah shook her head. ‘I just . . . I knew it was wrong. I just gave in.’
    ‘Oh, Hannah,’ Lucy said. ‘When are you going to learn that just because somebody wants you